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Alternative Title

The Ethics seen by the medical law

Abstract

This study aims at understanding how the French law system has gradually incorporated the very complex notion of ethics, with a focus on French medical standards and regulations. At first sight, the law views ethics as an organized, supervised, and institutionalized collective reflection, a questioning on the purpose of medical sciences leading to a search for guiding rules prevailing the orientation of our society. Ethics becomes a support for the construction of the legal rule and creates links between the French society, medicine and the legislator. This approach generates what can be called “social” ethics. The judiciary organizes this extra-legal activity, which serves to provide new and fresh ideas, from which the law pulls profits. The rendition of ethics by the law is descriptive, the legislation concerning itself mostly with describing the components of the official institutions concerned with ethics and their implementation. Ethics is distanced, outside the law. Looking further in the texts and court decisions, ethics cannot be restricted to a notion simply external to the law. The law views ethics as the standards to be taken into account at the heart of the legal rule, which must build, order and regulate medical practices, biomedicine and medical research on human beings. Here, the system apprehends ethics in a prescriptive and censorial manner, stating principles that must guide the practice closer to morality. This other aspect demonstrates the supplementary role taken by the law system to regulate medical practices. This entails an ethics of medical research or a “medical” ethics deeply inspired by human consciousness. At this stage in the evolution of the French law system, this understanding of ethics, at the heart of the law, is more subject to variations, if not contradictions.